[Origin] Black Friday Week

And it was such a good opportunity for a pun, even.

How do you feel about the Origin sale?

• Best client ever, always glad to have a sale for it
• Worst client ever, who cares about sales for it
• The sale is great.
• The sale is okay.
• The sale is bad.
• Black Friday Week? More like Black Friday Weak!
• Something, something, the Origin of Potatoes.

I will play the game soon and see how it is. Heard it is infested with cheaters and that it is worse than BF1 (best BF imo). EDIT: i tried it and really like it so far. Can't say it is better than BF1 but i absolutely like the large open maps (reminds me of 1942). Cheaters are pretty rare between so far for me, at least obvious ones.

Thanks! Good to know.

Which will also be included in the game pass ultimate (ea play) in december if i remember correctly

Sure, that's easy - because it's not Steam :)

Its a stupid launcher...

1. You have to allow it to run a background process permanently to download updates, others check this at launch
2. You still can't snap its windows...in 2020
3. Your game library has no list view
4. You can only find / add friends if you know their ID, or email address...even if you just played with someone randomly
5. Origin in-game has no purpose whatsoever
6. Support is none existent.

(TL;DR VERSION : )
It had a rocky start, and the bad taste never quite washed off (plus EA had a bad track record). I mean there was the normal change resistance and the dislike for having another launcher, but it went a little bit deeper. At least, deeper than mishandling a bunch of games people were hyped about, and making them 'always online' on their new service that had disconnects and instability issues.

Part of the original EULA, which was otherwise pretty standard, didn't specify what data you gave it permission to access and for what context, and if I recall correctly it actually stated that you gave them free access to all your stuff. Kind of like when you get an app that will only function if you do the function agreement thing but on all features on your device (a thing that happens often in lazy design, to prevent hitting access roadblocks). When attention was called to it, they didn't clarify and gave a vague statement that hamfistedly waved it off as 'we would never abuse your data'. They tried to make the origin client non-optional and attached it to the update process on games that previously required no verification (or just DVD presence) to play, complete with that contentious EULA. They didn't really handle the whole thing very well, and with their reputation it was a big mess.

(EXTENDED WALL OF TEXT IS A GO)
While Origin was more stable the last I checked, I have my own bitter little thing against it despite still owning and using an account. And it's going to sound like bullshit, because it honestly shouldn't be possible without express permissions, and I'm hardly a new PC user either. Given they didn't seem to be taking it seriously and were going overboard with trying to shove Origin onto everything (and then preening about how many users they had on it), back then I decided to just not touch anything involving Origin, and jumped through the convoluted hoops they set up to patch stuff manually, often with links to files that were broken for months (I gave up on getting a content patch in Sims 3 at one point). Darkspore came out, and there was a discount on the 4-pack, and the demo didn't seem to have the Origin-associated EULA (I remember checking specifically, heh), so I got in on it with a bunch of other folks in a forum I was on back in the day. No origin required. All good. Until it wasn't, and I agreed to an EULA update after a patch without reading, and they 'got me' as a +1 on their business strategy, so my passive boycott was over. A few months later there was a humble bundle for Origin games, which included Mass Effect 3, a game I had to give up on due to my stance on Origin. I figure they already have my +1, so I might as well cash in on my soul being sold :P

So I'm installing Origin to finally finish the Mass Effect trilogy, and the installer hangs for a long while. I click to cancel out of the process, and then after some lag, I restart the installer and once again leave it going, assuming it takes so long because it's doing the usual thing of downloading the actual install stuff first. My computer is chugging, so I assume its accessing the HDD a ton as per installs used to. I get lucky and click out of watching something on youtube to check the current size of the origin folder (because surely just the launcher can't be THAT big?). Thats when I notice my HDD has a LOT of free space on it. I go to my games folder, and a lot of folders are missing. I panic. I control+alt+delete the Origin installer to death, and restart my computer. No more chugging. All folders under C:/games/ prior to /steam/ were missing, except for the /origin/ folder I specified for it to install to rather than in program files. I look inside my steam folder, and sure enough, it turns out my HDD was chugging because it was going through my masses of installed games and deleting them, and it was halfway through removing my Skyrim install. For some reason my computer was erasing my /games/ folder and seemingly going from A to Z, leaving the new origin folder spotlessly intact.

My memory is hazy on this, but I can't recall if the origin installer specifically asked for the windows UAC rights thing (as per the standard from Win7 onwards on certain processes). All I know is that the default install directory for origin is under /program files/ and not /games/, and it boggles my mind to even think about why it would delete at the root of where you tell it to install? I mean I tried to rationalise it that maybe something weird happened and a prompt popped up saying "do you want to delete everything" while I was typing something into the youtube search, and just instantly whisked the question away at my keypresses before my eyes even registered it, but why would my computer ask such a thing of a directory that wasn't even open or being interacted with? It sounds like not such a big deal, but back then I lived in a place where the wiring in both my house and the local area was trash, so internet speeds were horrible, and I had to leave steam downloading things over several nights (specifically over the night, where data wan't subtracted from a cap we had). The stuff I had installed took a lot of time to accrue, but the stuff that really burns me is the loss of savefiles for games like Elona, or my prized Toribash replays, or my accrued emultation savestate (back before they were porting them in collections), or my Skyrim savefile that I actually got pretty far in. I know that sounds dumb but after I got so far I never had the heart to start over from scratch again, especially given I'd have to go through the long process of finding / locating a billion mods I never memorised or noted, and then downloading them again.

Even if you don't believe my anecdote, which I'd understand, there was the other shortcomings that were never resolved even years after Origin got out of beta, and were still happening the last time I used it. The one that stung me in particular was the one that would randomly dump a bunch of data from a game you were installing. Up to 70% downloaded on a 90GB install? Oops, it just decided to randomly go down to 20% and ditch a ton of files... for... reasons? This is a phenomenon they knew about since beta, and their solution, as always, was to tell you to go into the options and enable the option that downloads the beta of the next Origin client update instead of using the current stable version? Yeah. Or how they never fixed the install / expansion patching for games like Spore, where it would outright break parts of the game even when following the very specific order of normal downloads and specific seperate patch file order they tell you to go through.

And I mean, lets be honest, my anecdote was a trashfire of a situation and it played directly into a kind of "Bad DRM wants to ERASE THE COMPETITION" kind of narrative, so I get why it sounds like bullshit, or typical lack of computer literacy making things seem spooky and malicious, but it was just poetic misfortune catching the deletion process when it was going through the steamapps/common folder. It's just a hell of a coincidence in timing and lacking absolutely any indication of a normal deletion process, with only a browser window and a hung origin installer to cast hypothesis from y'know? I will forever tell this as my digital campfire ghost-story, because I'm still salty :P.

I for one actually like it and find it better than Steam after the recent update which made most of Steam very laggy.

Yes. Agree.

Ok, maybe you don't play Titanfall or Battlefield or PvZ?